Books by Mara Leveritt

Dark Spell

Surviving The Sentence

By Mara Leveritt

As one of the three boys convicted in the West Memphis Three case, Jason Baldwin was sixteen when he heard himself sentenced to life in prison with no possibility of parole. Dark Spell is the account of what it was like to be taken in handcuffs and shackles into Arkansas’s adult prison system, where inmates and guards alike saw him as a Satanic child-killer.

Jason survived, day by day and year by year, in one of the harshest environments on American soil. This would be a hard story to bear, save that it is brightened and transformed by Jason’s insight and upbeat persona. Dark Spell illuminates the many ways America’s justice system, once having gone wrong, can fight to sustain that wrong.

Devil’s Knot

The True Story Of The West Memphis Three

By Mara Leveritt

In 2011, one of the greatest miscarriages of justice in American legal history was resolved when Damien Echols, Jason Baldwin, and Jessie Misskelley were released after eighteen years in prison. Award-winning journalist Mara Leveritt’s book, Devil’s Knot, remains the most comprehensive, insightful reporting ever done on the investigation, trials, and convictions of three teenage boys who became known throughout the world as the West Memphis Three.

With close-up views by many of its key participants, this award-winning account unravels the many tangled knots of this endlessly shocking case, one which will shape the American legal landscape for years to come.

Boys On The Tracks

A Mother’s Crusade For Justice

By Mara Leveritt

Award-winning investigative reporter Mara Leveritt’s debut is a wrecking-ball tale of tragedy, malfeasance, and machine politics that resembles an all-true Arkansas Confidential. In 1987, Linda Ives suffered a parental worst-nightmare when her son and a friend were run over by a train, whose crew observed them supine and covered with a tarp before impact.

Linda Ives assembled evidence that the boys had stumbled upon a diffuse conspiracy involving CIA-backed air suppliers to the Contras, who ran an enormous cocaine-trafficking operation from a remote airport. Mara Leveritt documents how Ives’s quest for justice was stymied, first by local agencies, then the state police, finally by the FBI.